Between 2003 and 2008 the state of Missouri has received over $14 million in bonuses directly tied to the inaccurate food stamp participation rate. The bonus money may have to be returned to the federal government, which would be difficult for a state struggling to balance its budget.
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• Beating Gov. Charlie Crist and electing Marco Rubio as Florida’s junior senator.
• “Taking out” Republican Sen. Bob Bennett of Utah because he’s a centrist.
• Ensuring the Republican establishment receives no credit for whatever success the GOP has in November.
As I explained in the earlier posts linked above, New York jurisprudence is perhaps the most hostile to property rights in the entire country. However, the general problem of overbroad definitions of blight exists in many states. Unconstrained definitions of “blight” undermine the efficacy of many states’ post-Kelo eminent domain reform laws, which forbid “economic development” condemnations but allow the same types of takings to continue under the guise of blight alleviation, an issue I discussed in detail in this article.
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An early backer of then-Sen. Barack Obama in his presidential primary fight against Hillary Clinton (she endorsed in January 2008 at the urging of her 18 year old daughter), the senator also voices some disappointment with the Obama administration.
She said the White House initially did not do a good enough job to fight perceptions “that we’re on the big guys’ side instead of on the little guys’ side.”
Forty-three percent (43%) of all voters say most members of Congress are corrupt, the highest level of belief since we began asking this question in June 2008. By comparison, just 32% say most congressmen are not corrupt, but that’s the lowest level of confidence in over 20 months. Twenty-five percent (25%) remain undecided.
Another new low is the number who say most members of Congress are more interested in their own careers than in helping other people.
(Want a free daily e-mail update? If it’s in the news, it’s in our polls). Rasmussen Reports updates are also available on Twitter or Facebook.
Only nine percent (9%) say the average congressman wants to help people more, down from 14% a month ago and the first time in over three years of surveying that the response to that question has been in single digits. Seventy-nine percent (79%) say most members of Congress put their own careers first.
Fifty-eight percent (58%) of U.S. voters now say Congress is doing a poor job. That’s the highest negative finding since Rasmussen Reports began surveying on the question in November 2006.
A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows just 27% of voters nationwide believe the federal government should provide bailout funding for California. Fifty-five percent (55%) think the federal government should let the state go bankrupt instead. Seventeen percent (17%) are not sure.
No matter how you frame the choice for voters, bailing out California is unpopular.
Schwarzenegger himself has said that California may seek $8 billion in federal funding assistance. When we ask about that request without mentioning the trade-off of filing bankruptcy, only 16% of voters nationally favor the bailout. Sixty-eight percent (68%) oppose an $8-billion bailout for California, with another 16% undecided.
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So, it’s worth asking on this cold January day: could Howard Dean primary Barack Obama?
Of course he could, but nobody should expect him to topple the President. If Theodore Roosevelt couldn’t successfully primary Howard Taft in 1912, what hope does any insurgent have, especially one who lost out to John Kerry?
Now, the nomination battle has changed quite a bit in the 98 years since Teddy took on the Big Lub, but the following is most definitely true. Incumbent presidents who were elected to office were often denied their party’s re-nomination in the 19th century (the first loser being the drunk, incompetent Franklin Pierce in 1856), but it is a very rare occurrence these days. And by rare I mean it hasn’t happened in over a century.
The administration claims that it simply had to send six detainees from lockup in Guantanamo Bay to al-Qaeda Central in Yemen. A federal judge had found that there was insufficient evidence to hold one of them as an enemy combatant. Deducing that the cases against the other five were equally weak or worse, the Justice Department decided that all six should be sprung. Those were just the Yemenis. White House officials did not comment to the Post on the administration’s equally indefensible decision to send another half-dozen detainees to Afghanistan and Somaliland – which, like dumping jihadists in Yemen, is tantamount to sending them back to al-Qaeda.
These are not just bad decisions. They amount to a scandal. Let’s count the ways.
But more is plainly needed. One possible area is education, where 1990s reforms and the Bush education law have encountered strong institutional resistance from teachers’ unions and education schools. Manzi, citing models in Sweden and the Netherlands, calls for “the creation of a real marketplace among ever more deregulated publicly financed schools — a market in which funding follows students, and far broader discretion is permitted to those who actually teach and manage in our schools.”
Bob Bennett has made no secret of his disdain for conservatives. Though he is not in the Republican Senate leadership, his best friend forever Mitch McConnell has allowed him a seat at the table. Using that position and the ear of his bff, Bennett has sabotaged pro-life legislation, ethics reform, tax reform, and regulatory reform that would help entrepreneurial small businesses over the big businesses the GOP so often considers their friend because the word “business” appears in the phrase. (more…)
